Weird NYT front-pager on a decision confronting President Obama: "whether the government must provide health insurance benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees."

As a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama said he would “fight hard” for the rights of gay couples. As a senator, he sponsored legislation that would have provided health benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees.

Now, Mr. Obama is in a tough spot. If he supports the personnel office on denying benefits to the San Francisco court employees, he risks agitating liberal groups that helped him win election. If he supports the judges and challenges the marriage act, he risks alienating Republicans with whom he is seeking to work on economic, health care and numerous other matters.

Is it just me, or is this in fact not a particularly tough spot at all? The situation is apparently as follows: Obama supports same-sex-partner benefits. His base supports same-sex-partner benefits. And a clear majority of the American people (73 percent, according to a Newsweek poll from three months ago) support same-sex-partner benefits. (The Times story doesn't mention this last point for some reason.) The only people who don't support it are members of the minority party. And Obama is supposed to capitulate to them because he needs their support on health care? How is that going to work? Are the Republicans going to explicitly agree to vote for health care reform as long as the gays don't get benefits? Or is Obama going to fold in the hope that folding will in some intangible way make the Republians more tractable on big economic issues? What's the percentage in capitulating, for Obama?

Behind this Times piece, I suspect, is the present media consensus that Obama's change-the-tone rhetoric somehow means that any kind of confrontation will be disastrous for him. So far, there is little evidence to support this.

Thomas Friedman can be a shallow thinker, but I've rarely seen him write anything as straight-up wrongheaded as this. His argument is that the government's injection of equity into the banks is probably necessary, but it's also dangerous, because ... well, here's why it's dangerous:

Let’s imagine this scene: You are the president of one of these banks in which the government has taken a position. One day two young Stanford grads walk in your door. One is named Larry, and the other is named Sergey. They each are wearing jeans and a T-shirt. They tell you that they have this thing called a “search engine,” and they are naming it — get this — “Google.” They tell you to type in any word in this box on a computer screen and — get this — hit a button labeled “I’m Feeling Lucky.” Up comes a bunch of Web sites related to that word. Their start-up, which they are operating out of their dorm room, has exhausted its venture capital. They need a loan.

What are you going to say to Larry and Sergey as the president of the bank? “Boys, this is very interesting. But I have the U.S. Treasury as my biggest shareholder today, and if you think I’m going to put money into something called ‘Google,’ with a key called ‘I’m Feeling Lucky,’ you’re fresh outta luck. Can you imagine me explaining that to a Congressional committee if you guys go bust?”

(Is there anything more perfectly Friedmanesque than the way he (a) works in a reference to the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, and (b) misstates what it does?)

This story and the threat it raises -- future Googles stifled in their cribs by risk-averse government bureaucrats -- has no connection to reality. When Larry and Sergey wanted money to start Google they didn't go to a bank and take out a loan. First they found an angel investor named Andy Bechtolsheim, who'd made his money as a cofounder of Sun Microsystems. Then they went to John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins and Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital, the two most famous venture investors in Silicn Valley.

In other words, they raised money by selling equity rather than by borrowing. This is how startup financing works, for obvious reasons: Almost all startups fail. So a bank that lent money to guys like Larry and Sergey would see default rates that would make subprime mortgages look blue-chip. A venture investor, on the other hand, gets a share of the upside; he's happy to watch nine startups fail as long as the tenth is Google.

(Venture firms are currently reducing their investments in response to the bleak economic picture, and that might slow the parade of new Googles, but it has nothing to do with government ownership of the banks.)

OK, ignore the Larry-and-Sergey story. Does Friedman have a deeper argument? I guess it's that banks with public equity will be more risk-averse in lending, because ... well, he doesn't really say why. Oh, OK, he says they'll have to justify each failed loan to "a Congressional committee," which given the number of loans involved is absurd on its face. Is that just a cutesy way of saying that they'll have to justify their balance sheets as a whole? If so, what makes Friedman think a Congressional committee would be more risk-averse than private shareholders?

The problem in the economy is that, right now, private lenders are maximally risk-averse: until last week they weren't lending at all. The government took positions in banks precisely to encourage them to make riskier loans than they were making under private ownership. It doesn't seem to be working, but (pace Friedman) that's not because those bold risk-taking bankers are being stymied by government bean-counters. It's because the banks don't want to make any loans at all, and (so far) the government isn't forcing them to.

Whoa: Earnings from the news operations of the New York Times (i.e. the newspapers as opposed to the company's other holdings), third quarter of last year: $79 million. Third quarter of this year: $37 million.

Brookswatch! (Let's just make it a regular feature and be done with it.) So today David Brooks checks in on Patio Man, a character who typefies the rising exurban middle class. Weirdly, I don't find the Patio Man concept particularly annoying, for two reasons: (1) Brooks doesn't overuse his coinages the way his colleague Tom "flat world/petro-authoritarianism/green-collar jobs/etc. etc. etc." Friedman does; and (2) Brooks's attention to the actual conditions of life in the exurbs is a useful counterweight to the Palinites' fetishization of an entirely invented "Main Street." Also, to be honest, maybe I'm soft on Patio Man because today he's leaning Democratic:

But deeper down, there are some shifts in values. Americans, including suburban Americans, are less socially conservative. They are more aware of the gap between rich and poor. They are more open to government action to reduce poverty....

But the shift in public opinion is not from right to left, or from anti-government to pro-government, it’s from risk to caution, from disorder to consolidation....

Democrats have done well in suburbia recently because they have run the kind of candidates who seem like the safer choice — socially moderate, pragmatic and fiscally hawkish. They, or any party, will run astray if they threaten the mood of chastened sobriety that has swept over the subdivisions.

But look at Brooks's weird swerve in the last paragraph:

Patio Man wants change. But this is no time for more risk or more debt. Debt in the future is no solution to the debt racked up in the past.

If Patio Man really believes this, Patio Man is obviously wrong. (Even the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, whose raison d'être is to fight deficit spending, agrees that the present situation urgently requires deficit spending.) It wouldn't be too surprising for Patio Man to be wrong about this: he probably hasn't read Keynes, and he has a tendency to overgeneralize from family budgeting to fiscal policy. ("Debt in the future is no solution to debt in the past" might make sense when it comes to Patio Man's own finances, but the rules that apply to a suburban family don't necessarily scale to the level of the federal government.) But does David Brooks agree with Patio Man on this? If not, shouldn't he come out and say so? If so, shouldn't he go down the hall and ask Paul Krugman for some very remedial tutoring?

Barack Obama has been president for negative-21 days, and David Brooks can already see the backlash.

Two weeks ago, Thomas Friedman wrote: "What would impress me from Obama? How about this: ' ... I’m going to keep Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson on the job for a while. I am impressed with his handling of this crisis.'”

This was a classic bit of MSM false equivalence: Friedman had just urged John McCain to take certain un-Republican positions, so he's contractually obligated to ask for some equivalent un-Democratic statement from Obama. But imagine if Obama had taken Friedman's advice and tied himself to Paulson, who in mid-September was largely untested. From today's NYT:

The Treasury Department’s surprising turnaround on the issue of buying stock in banks, which has now become its primary focus, has raised questions about whether the administration squandered valuable time in trying to sell Congress on a plan that officials had failed to think through in advance.
It has also raised questions about whether the administration’s deep philosophical aversion to government ownership in private companies hindered its ability to look at all options for stabilizing the markets.
Some experts also contend that Treasury’s decision last month to not use taxpayer money to save Lehman Brothers worsened the panic that quickly metastasized into an international crisis.

So according to the NYT's David Sanger, "a fierce struggle has been under way for the foreign policy heart of John McCain." Sanger is referring to the debate between the neocon and the realist wings of the Republican Party, although for some reason he doesn't use those words. His portrait of McCain's foreign-policy thinking would be very interesting if it weren't so completely deceptive.

Look at who McCain's top foreign-policy advisor is. Look at his reflexively bellicose response to the Russa/Georgia flare-up. Look at his unwavering support for the Iraq War and his grandiose definition of victory there. Look at his disdain for the idea of negotiation with Iran, Syria, North Korea -- countries with whom even the Bush administration has opened lines of communication.

Now name one foreign-policy situation -- just one -- since Sept. 11, 2001 on which John McCain has taken the realist position. (An anonymous McCain adviser cites the senator's laudable role in the normalization of relations with Vietnam -- an effort that peaked in January, 1993.)

Sanger writes that McCain "defies easy categorization. His threat to throw Russia out of the Group of Eight industrial nations went far beyond anything Mr. Bush has said, and he has often sounded more hard line than Mr. Bush about doing whatever it takes to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon." This is like saying that Jesse Helms "defied easy categorization" because he opposed school integration, the Civil Rights Act, and Martin Luther King Day. McCain's foreign policy, in fact, invites easy characterization, and only the shreds of his reputation as a "maverick" could lead any journalist to think otherwise.

Check out Gary Hart's very public application for a job in the Obama administration.

This week's Vows column is kind of a doozy.

Pants on (Sa)fire: Pedantic warmonger William Safire, guest-blogging for Oxford University Press, claims to have made up the verb "consense":

As a language columnist, I feel free to coin a neologism now and then; “consense” is a verb that can replace “form a consensus”. Not the opposite of “nonsense”.

Anyone who has spent even a little time around left-wing politics and activism has heard "consense" used in exactly this way a hundred times. Wiktionary has several citations, including one from 1970 -- a speech by pioneering gay activist Harry Hay. Looks like the queers beat you to that one, Bill!

Yes, I can see how that would work: "By distributing fliers — '10 Reasons to Wait' — outside of a freshman safe-sex seminar, he instantly gained 'a public image' for abstinence, he said, which has helped him to remain chaste ever since." [NYT Mag]

Earnest? Really? "Much the way Hollywood people have shuttled between Los Angeles and Manhattan for decades, or academics commute on the Acela between Morningside Heights and Cambridge, Mass., there is a young, earnest population that is beating a path between artsy, gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn and their counterparts in the Bay Area." [NYT]

Times staffers (up to and including Bill Keller) answer readers' questions about the McCain story.

Young people are deserting newspapers in droves. What better way to win them back than this?

Amazing NYT front-pager yesterday: For 20 years, the World Bank and the western countries that give aid to Africa have been demanding that recipient countries not provide subsidies to farmers. Instead, the western donors have advocated a "free-market" paradigm in which poor countries grow cash crops instead of food, then buy food from rich countries (which massively subsidize their own farmers). Without subsidies, African farmers can't afford to buy fertilizer, which means they can't afford to grow food.

Two years ago, after a poor harvest led to a devastating famine, Malawi's president, as the Times puts it, "decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached," and reinstated fertilizer subsidies. Now Malawi is selling surplus corn to Zimbabwe, and UNICEF is sending the powdered milk it has stockpiled in Malawi to Uganda instead.

It's an incredible indictment of western aid policy and the failures of free-market dogma. Those who read to the end will be rewarded with a scene in which a village chief performs "a silly pantomime."

The song remains the same

David Brooks has addressed himself to the subject of rock music, and as you'd expect it's a total Rothgasm.

Brooks's problem is that rock is no longer a monolithic entity centered on megastars like the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, or Bruce Springsteen, because "there are now dozens of niche musical genres where there used to be this thing called rock." In making his case, Brooks pulls off a pretty incredible rhetorical trick. Watch as he explains the fragmentation of the pop-music audience:

Music industry executives can use market research to divide consumers into narrower and narrower slices... And there’s the rise of the mass educated class. People who have built up cultural capital and pride themselves on their superior discernment are naturally going to cultivate ever more obscure musical tastes. I’m not sure they enjoy music more than the throngs who sat around listening to Led Zeppelin, but they can certainly feel more individualistic and special.

In other words, the fact that people are listening to a variety of different musicians and genres indicates that they are both (a) sheep who have been brainwashed by "music industry executives," and (b) posers eager to show off their specialness. Whereas back when everyone was grooving on Led Zep together, they were all free-choosing individuals, immune to marketing and peer pressure. Yes, that makes sense.

Brooks trots out Steven Van Zandt to bolster his credibility, but Van Zandt doesn't seem very interested in Brooks's fragmentation narrative. He makes a different argument: the familiar "today's music sucks in comparison to the music that was popular during the years when I was fourteen through twenty-two, which happened to be the greatest music ever made" argument.

Van Zandt "argues that if the Rolling Stones came along now, they wouldn't be able to get mass airtime because there is no broadcast vehicle for all-purpose rock." This is a bit like saying that if World War II were fought today it would be over in five minutes because the Germans would be on the same side as the British and the Americans. If the Rolling Stones came along now, they wouldn't be able to get mass airtime because everyone would think they were ripping off the Rolling Stones.

Hilariously, Van Zandt has

drawn up a high school music curriculum that tells American history through music. It would introduce students to Muddy Waters, the Mississippi Sheiks, Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers. He’s trying to use music to motivate and engage students, but most of all, he is trying to establish a canon, a common tradition that reminds students that they are inheritors of a long conversation.

Good idea, Miami Steve -- let's sit the kids down in the classroom together, the ones who listen to Justin Timberlake and the ones who listen to Radiohead, the ones who like Lil Wayne and the ones who like the Get-Up Kids, the one who's into Ornette Coleman and the one who's into Deicide and the one who just borrowed her parents' Dylan tapes, and let's explain to them that they should all start listening to the Allman Brothers, because they are the inheritors of a long conversation that culminates with bearded white men making their guitars go hoodly-hoodly-hooooo! I bet that'll work real well.

Maureen Dowd has been punting a lot lately. Today she turns her column over to Saturday Night Live head writer Seth Meyers to do gags about the TV writers' strike. But there's something off about this bit:

As a comedy writer, I am more than willing to admit that I need a world with producers, but do they need us? The answer is yes, for two reasons. First, without writers whom will the studios blame for their failures? Second, seriously, whom?

Does anyone else detect the heavy hand of the Times copy desk here? Or did Meyers really land the joke on whom rather than who?

You heard it here first: RoBros, 11/1/07; NYT, 11/11/07.

Least comforting assertion of the day: From David Brooks's NYT column:

The Bush administration is not about to bomb Iran (trust me).

If you skipped Anthony Lewis's NYT Book Review essay on two recent Bush books, good call -- Lewis is clearly one of those old guys who can no longer identify what counts as common knowledge. (Random cliché sampling: "The one clear winner from the invasion and the consequent civil strife has been neighboring Iran ... Bush seems to lack the intellectual curiosity that makes for an interesting mind ... there is another, less attractive part of the Bush persona: the mean-minded frat boy ... what I think will be seen, along with the Iraq war, as the most important legacy of Bush’s presidency: his effort to enlarge the unilateral power of the president.")

Lewis wraps up this bloviation with a conclusion that's off-base on two counts. He writes:

There is a profound oddity in the position of the presidentialists like Yoo, Cheney and Addington. Legal conservatives like to say that the Constitution should be read according to its original intent. But if there is anything clear about the intentions of the framers, it is that they did not intend to create an executive with more prerogative power than George III had.

I'm not sure this "oddity" really exists. First of all, the statement "legal conservatives like to say that the Constitution should be read according to its original intent" is almost exactly wrong. The poster boy for originalism, Antonin Scalia, in his "Theory of Constitutional Interpretation" speech, said this:

You will never hear me refer to original intent, because as I say I am first of all a textualist, and secondly an originalist. If you are a textualist, you don't care about the intent, and I don't care if the framers of the Constitution had some secret meaning in mind when they adopted its words.

But even if Lewis had accurately represented the views of conservative originalists, that wouldn't mean that executive-branch-supremacists like Dick Cheney and David Addington were hypocrites. As far as I know, neither is specifically associated with constitutional originalism. (John Yoo is a slightly more complex case.) Some conservatives believe in being faithful to the constitution. Some believe in letting the president do whatever the hell he wants at all times. This is not a "profound oddity"; it's an easily observable fact.

Am I wrong about this? People who actually know something about the law, please let me know.